BASE problem

The library seems to ignore the BASE directive in HTML documents.
Is this true?
I have encountered a number of documents that specify a BASE tag. It
seems the library (when processing relative URLs in a document with a
BASE tag) returns child anchors that are not modified by that BASE tag
directive.
Am I ignorant to some magic routine in the library that I should call
to get this base information?
Rob
rmf@bbn.com